The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Steve Wozniak

Steve Wozniak is best known as the co-founder of Computer, which helped shape the personal computer industry with the popular Macintosh. For his achievements at Apple Computer, Steve was awarded the National Medal of Technology by the President of the United States in 1985, the highest honor bestowed on America's leading innovators.

In 2000, Steve was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame and was awarded the prestigious Heinz Award for Technology. He founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and was the founding sponsor of the Tech Museum, Silicon Valley Ballet and Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose. He is also the author of iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon.

In this interview, he talks about his biggest career challenges, what his typical day looks like, what he admired most about the late Steve Jobs, the biggest trend in technology right now and his top pieces of career advice.

Looking back at your career, what would you say your three biggest challenges were? How did you overcome them?

1. Creating a color computer that was an entertainment machine too. Color had never been done digitally. There was no digital formula in any book. Color generation cost a lot of money by the established ways. I got an idea of how to do it with a $1 digital chip and I knew that the analog TV's would interpret this as color.

2. Creating a PAL version of the Apple ][, doing color the PAL way. To save parts I had played with such parameters as video timing. That was fine for NTSC but in PAL, each line has alternating phases for the same color. It's like 'inverting' the signal on odd lines, or shifting it in time by 180 degrees of the color waveform frequency. This I accomplished and got to work. But for the Apple ][ hi-res mode, color was very much an accident of when a dot occurred on a line. If it was in an odd pixel position on an odd line number, it was purple, otherwise green. But line numbers and pixel position would reverse this. And then I had a scheme where shifting the dot a half-pixel position gave 2 more colors.

I was sure that by the laws of math and physics and how PAL was defined, color would not work, especially the advanced 6-color mode. The even lines would be cancelled out by the odd lines and all you'd see was green and purple mixed. But for some reason, it worked without my understanding why. To this day I do not know why it worked since my own analysis was that it would not work.